I'm meeting-ed out

Many of you may not know that besides my profession as a realtor, I'm also serving this year as Association president for the local Kingman/Golden Valley Association of REALTORS. This means that I am volunteering quite a bit of my time to the operation of the local Association.

Monday morning I attended a bylaws meeting to ask the committee to come up with some changes for a special election to alter our Association elections, and to do this change for this year. See locally we have agreed with the other regional Associations (of Lake Havasu City and Bullhead City) to merge our MLS's. Currently the Associaiton has an executive position called the MLS president, but when all goes well with the merger there won't be a need for the MLS president (the MLS president is also the Association vice president). So I've asked the committee to adapt a position of President Elect, like most other Associaitons have. I'm happy to say that committee Chairperson Yvonne Reil (a frequent reader of this site) worked hard and put this together in time for the monthly Board of Directors meeting today (more on that later). The committee also added some requirements to serve on the Board, and changed the petition rule to hopefully create more interest from the Members to perhaps run in the elections for the positions available. Okay, that was Monday.

Tuesday morning I held the introductory component of the Association orientation for new Members. Had roughly 40 newbies in the audience (and probably put 25 of them to sleep at times). I believe this is the eighth time I've conducted this portion of the orientation and as always I'm looking to improve the presentation each time. However, at some point another Member is going to have to take over this duty. The application process is easy, please contact me if interested.

Wednesday morning we hold the MLS meeting at our board office and usually the MLS president presides over the meeting. However she (Rita Zumwalt -- oh and Rita get a website that I can link to) is on vacation and I was asked to run the meeting. I wore a hawaiian shirt (I need to pick up dry cleaning like real soon) as it was going to be rather hot that day. Of course I'm the only one in attendance wearing such a shirt and opened my comments after the pledge of allegiance by saying, "Alright, who is the wise guy that emailed me to say that today was hawaiian day?" I love starting that meeting off with something silly to say just to break up the morning a bit. There are so many new faces at the MLS meetings now (our Association has 512 agent Members now, up from 112 when I started in 2001), so when I call on someone to speak of their new listings I don't always know their names and honestly haven't mastered the art of remembering their names. I'm losing touch with my constituency.

Finally this morning, the Board of Directors meeting. The MLS committee Chair, Wayne Wissenger, started it off (before I called the meeting to order) by showing us some great innovations with Mohave County's GIS mapping program. It's the simple things that I can't believe I miss out on, he did a couple of clicks and I realized that I've been making that mapping program alot harder to use than it actually is. I started the meeting after his presentation, it's nice to see faces in the audience, even it's mostly committee members who are there to give their reports. Serving on the Board since 2002, I've been begging other Members to attend these meetings and only a few times did we ever get people there. There have been a few exceptions (like when we are proposing what some think are drastic changes), but for the most part... no one but us volunteer Directors.

I'm happy to say that the Association has seen an obvious interest coming from the Members now and I hope it continues well into the future. The time is now to make our Association better than it ever has been and I believe there is enough talented Members to see to this goal.

While I'm indeed meeting-ed out this week, I'm incredibly proud of the Members that serve on the Board with me this year. It has been a total pleasure (and heck I still have 5 plus months to go as president. I'm also proud to see the committees stay as active as they have been. It was my number one goal this year to make committee involvement happen. There is still plenty of room for improvement but this current Board owes alot of gratitude to the committees.

Thanks for letting me ramble on. Looking at my calendar.. no meeting's for me on the schedule. Now maybe I can get some more clients to serve. Yeah, that'd be nice.